Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

Please email me a title and a short abstract that describes your presentation. For example, here is one from last year:

“A Network Perspective on Passing Legislation”

Matthew Howell

Passing legislation in the US Congress involves navigating a bill through numerous checkpoints. Overcoming these checkpoints is made easier by making trades among Congressmen who have control over the various checkpoints, and by having many other representatives backing the bill, amendment, or law. While in theory, all congressmen could know all other congressmen, member time is highly structured by the committee process, and so the committee assignments network is used to examine the impact of working with many fellow committee-members (out-degree centrality) and working with many well-connected members (eigenvector centrality) to pass legislation.

Fall 2010

CJT 780 SPECIAL TOPICS IN COMMUNICATION: INNOVATION IN CLINICAL AND TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCE

CLASS HOURS: T 3:30-6:00

This seminar is intended to acquaint students with theory and empirical work related to organizational communication and organizational innovation as they relate to Clinical and Translational Science (CTS), especially T-2 or higher translations. CTS developments have been perhaps the major new policy initiatives at the National Institutes of Health, but they also reflect a very general concern with the slow diffusion of research, innovations, and best practices in a number of settings (e.g., education, agriculture, business, and so on). The course will provide students with an overview of traditional organizational communication approaches to innovation focusing particularly on diffusion of innovations frameworks, which rely heavily on network analysis, which are often termed dissemination in CTS approaches. The course will conclude with a discussion of models for organizing research programs in CTS innovation and the future of innovation and CTS research.

A major resource for the class will be a book length case study on the Cancer Information Service Research Consortium, whose membership included a number of subsequent leaders of the Clinical and Translation Science movement, that has broad applicability to a range of disciplines

The first unit of the course will provide students with an overview of the basics of dissemination, translational, and innovation research from a broad array of social science sources: including management, anthropology, sociology, political science, social and developmental psychology, geography, decision sciences, information science, public health, and communication. Students will then have an opportunity to apply course subject matter to a variety of specific problems of their choosing.

For more information contact:

INSTRUCTOR: Dr. J. David Johnson

Department of Communication230 Grehan BuildingUniversity of KentuckyLexington, KY 40506-0042(859) 257-3621FAX: (859) 257-4103E-MAIL: jdj@uky.eduWEB PAGE: http://comm.uky.edu/jdjohnson (which has a draft of the syllabus of the course)

I’m giving a colloquium on a new class of centrality measures tomorrow (fri Mar 5) – you are welcome to come. The room is B&E 446 (or next door to it – I forget which is which) and the talk starts at 11am. The title of the talk is:

The UK economics department is interviewing a job market candidate, Roland Pongou, who uses network theory to study the spread of AIDS in Africa. Roland will be on campus Monday and Tuesday next week. He will be giving a talk on Monday from 3:00-4:30pm in B&E 301. The title of his talk is: “The Economics of Fidelity in Network Formation.” All are invited.

We are organizing an exciting workshop on “Information in Networks” in New York September 25-26.

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together leading researchers studying information in networks from different perspectives in order to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a multidisciplinary research community. Speakers will share their recent research, which may have been published elsewhere, but which may not be widely known outside of their own disciplines. As the workshop is intended to facilitate interaction, the program will include substantial time for discussion. We hope the energy of New York City will inspire the gathering, and that our participants will leave with new ideas and a stronger sense of community.

We’d like to invite you to submit your work. A Call for Participation with more details is attached. Feel free to forward the call to any colleagues or graduate students you think would be interested in submitting and attending.

Please let us know if we can answer any questions and please cc Shirley Lau (info@winworkshop.net) on any correspondence.

Martin Everett has a master’s degree in mathematics and completed a doctorate on social networks at Oxford University under Clyde Mitchell, one of the pioneers of the subject. He has been an active in social network research for over thirty years and has published over 100 articles mainly on social networks. In 1987 during a sabbatical at the University of California Irvine he teamed up with Steve Borgatti. They have collaborated ever since researching and publishing on methods for social networks, teaching workshops and producing the software program UCINET. Martin has been the president of INSNA the international professional body for social network analysis and still serves on the board; in 2001 he was awarded the Simmel award from the society, the highest award available.